


Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?

by fire_is_my_happy_place



Series: The Undying [2]
Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/M, M/M, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Child Abuse, Past Domestic Violence, Suicide Attempt, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-13 10:33:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3378299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_is_my_happy_place/pseuds/fire_is_my_happy_place
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The RED!Soldier enlisted in 1941 to please his father, to finally prove himself to be a better man than his father ever predicted he could be. When he receives the news that his father has died before he could prove to him the kind of man he has become, the RED!Soldier is left with his memories, and the devastation his father left in his life.</p><p>He discovers quickly that he's never been cut out for life outside war. A last minute invitation from RED is both his salvation and his undoing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

He was cold. He knew that much from the distant pressure of the mud pulling at his tight laces, trying to suck the boot right off his foot. So many of the roads they marched down were all mud, little paths between towns and villages that were traveled primarily by foot, or by horse and cart, or the rare truck. He was cold and his footsteps traveled ahead of him, trammeling mud and crap and the dead grass of winter into a rut.

Somewhere behind him, there were distant voices, as message laden as the birds calling each other in the high, cold sky. But ahead of him was the trail of his footsteps, calling him to put one foot in front of the other and follow and follow and follow. He followed them, sometimes stumbling, legs straining to pull his foot free of the damn mud, mud everywhere, everything covered in mud that simply gave way under his boots to pull at them again.

The birds sang again, or perhaps those were voices coming closer, and he could swear he heard his name. _David_. The birds were in his ear now. _David. David_. They wouldn’t leave him alone, let him keep following his footsteps, they made him think about the cold, his distant feet, and the frigid fingers crawling up his legs.

He lifted one foot after the other, stumbling forward, his feet slow and stupid, eyes on the trail of his footprints stretching out ahead of him.

The birds had grabbed him, they kept calling his name, and there were so many, their hands hot on his skin, trails of pain and needles, and they pulled him sideways, pulling his feet from the track. Someone wrapped a blanket around him tightly, and they held him while a larger needle sought the vein in the crook of his elbow. It stung, that needle, and his skin crawled in the blanket.

He looked around at the birds, their pale faces calling, the flecks of mud on everything: on hair, on faces, their hands, cold splotches on his skin and he recognized them with a blinding flash of shame. His unit. The birds were men in his unit, the men who had bought him the news.

 _My father is dead_ , he thought, shame dissolving under the weight of the words.

Then something stole up behind him, wrapping its arms around him, and pulled him down into the darkness.


	2. The Luckiest Man in Hell

He wasn’t the first man sectioned out due to shell shock, nor would he be the last. They held on to him, despite the crying fits, the screaming in his dreams that made the other men in his unit stuff a sock in his mouth and hold him down until he woke, and his restless irritability. They held on to him because if there was even the off chance that he might die, he volunteered.

He wasn’t a coward—he would never have made it easy on the Nazis or the fascists to kill him—but he was eager to die doing the right thing, to die a hero. David was, however, the single luckiest or unluckiest man he knew, depending on how you wanted to look at it. He survived, every single goddamn time, sometimes without a wound at all, as if god himself had taken a shine to David and wanted to make sure he made it through the war.

David knew for a fact that god was cruel, simply based on this fact alone: he was stubbornly, persistently, even magically still alive. He had once run up to a tank in a convoy and slapped a charge on it, somehow managing to avoid the machine guns on the tank and its squad-mates’ roofs. When he’d blown the charge he’d been too close. He expected to die, but instead had been thrown backward, narrowly missed by a heavy section of the tank’s treads, and lived to stand, ears ringing, then run back to cover. Another time, he’d been first up the hill, charging toward a nest, and only gotten a flesh wound on his leg for his pains.

David wanted to track the chaplain down and beat him until god took notice. He drank, instead, and volunteered again and again. But as soon as the tide turned for the Allies, his sergeant had pulled him aside. 

“Son, don’t get me wrong, you have an impressive record. But it’s real clear to the rest of us that you have some problems, and you’re going to get more people killed trying to save you. We’re going to send you back to a nice hospital, and they’ll get you fixed up.” 

The sergeant patted him awkwardly on the back once, a rough slap that said as much as the man could about his worries. His unit members had dragged him out of his tent the next morning to put him on a truck, headed back toward some of the more permanent encampments, and that, as they said, was that.

David watched the landscape roll by, muddy hill after muddy hill, from the back of the truck. They’d sent him by himself, but for a packet of the inevitable paperwork from his unit. With refueling, the trip meant several days on the road. One of the men he’d known had been kind enough to tuck a flask into his pack, and he drank, hoping for a sniper, or an ambush, or even just a flat tire—anything that would prevent the Army from ushering him off the battlefield and a chance to be a hero. But each hour was much like the previous, ticking along with the miles between encampments and refueling. By the time they’d driven him to an airfield, he realized that he was inches from doing something stupid with a sidearm or offering to blow a straight man just to get into the inevitable fight. 

It was, after all, something his father would have predicted he’d do.

His mind touched the thought like a sore tooth and veered away. There was not enough distance between the thought of his father and himself—not enough liquor in the flask, painfully empty for hours.

When the truck stopped, he staggered from it and stretched, his duffel swinging free on his back. The driver hopped down, knuckling his lower back.

“Well,” he said, “here we are. Your buddies said you’d want a drink, so I’ll point you to “Sergeant Smitty” in that tent. Just ask for him by name, and they’ll know what you want.” 

He waddled off into the camp, still knuckling the knots in his back, leaving David standing in front of a messy array of buildings and tents beside a long strip of commandeered road, tarred and roughly painted. A small row of light planes sat ready, and as he watched, one was carefully driven away from its companions and took off, with a buzzing roar.

David forced his knees together against the dull ache of his back and staggered then carefully walked, for the tent the driver had pointed out. As he pushed through the canvas flap, he ran into another man, who spat at him before staggering out into the night. The tent inside was filthy—empty meal packets, the occasional broken bottle, and mildewing splatters of vomit dotted the inside of the tent. A small, dark haired man sat at one of the tables by himself in the otherwise empty tent, shuffling and reshuffling a deck of cards. He looked up incuriously at David.

“You here to see Smitty?”

“Yeah,” David said, looking for a clean spot to lay his duffel, finally resting it in a chair.

“Ten dollars,” said the small, dark haired man.

David dug the money out without complaint, despite the price, and filled his flask from the heavy crockery under the table, then got a second flask from a near table and filled it, as well. The man simply shrugged when he’d come back with the second flask and filled it as well. David tucked the second flask into his bag and started drinking immediately, letting the tears from the raw liquor run down his face and pulling at it like a child at a bottle.

“Slow down, champ, or you’ll toss up all over my tent.” The man looked at him with mild censure. “God knows there’s enough puke in here.”

David lowered the bottle when his body started screaming for oxygen. “How much to fill it again?”

“Shit, kid,” the man said. “Been a rough war? Tell you what, I’ll refill it for another five dollars and let you sit and get tight.”

David gave him the money and refilled his flask, nursing it gently until the room spun pleasantly.

“Hey, kid,” the man said, “you shipping out?”

“Back home,” David muttered. “Or to a goddamn hospital.”

“No joke, with the way you’re drinking.”

After a moment, David realized dully that the choking noise was the sound of his laughter, a sound more like the last gasp of someone being hung than it was the sound of merriment. The man looked at him more cautiously.

“Look, kid, whatever it is, I don’t want any of it. You can stay if you stay quiet.”

David put his head on his folded arms, clutching the flask upright, and waited for the MPs to drag him to the plane.


	3. How Are You Feeling, Today?

The plane ride to a more major airstrip had been noisy but uneventful, the plane roaring along at a low altitude for hours. By the time they’d reached that airstrip, David was drunk again. Crammed into a tiny seat and covered by a flak-jacket, he spent the entire ride trying to figure out what the hell to do with himself when they dishonorably discharged him. He’d never learned to read well, he didn’t have much in the way of skills but brawling, shooting, and volunteering to get hurt.

David briefly contemplated boxing or other sports, and realized that he didn’t have the necessary detachment to make a game out of trying to hurt someone. He compared the boneless bodies of German soldiers, civilians, children to the ring and the elaborate game of sports, where losing cost you nothing more than embarrassment. He could taste the blood and mud in his mouth, the bile burning the back of his throat the first time he’d pulled a familiar face from wreckage, the dull, numbing impact of staring into a face that had just been talking to him, just been joking about wet feet and the cold.

He could taste the rain that ran into his mouth, carrying dirt and sweat and the grease of his unwashed hair, could still see the face of the man who had gone after him, trying to prevent him from getting killed to place the slap charge. David could see the holes in that body, the torn flap of skin hanging from one cheek and the pulverized bone of the jaw, teeth embedded in the back of the throat.

The bodies and their meat, their leaking, rotting meat—where did this fit in a clean, sanded ring? Where was the mud on those silky shorts? What did the baying crowd know of violence?

At this thought, he pulled both flasks out of the duffel by his feet and started to drain them. He had nothing to go home to, no occupation beside violence, real violence. David supposed he could try to find his mother, but he had no idea where to start or what to look for. His memories of her were blurry—a thin body in flowery print and a whisper of a voice. She’d left him his hair color, the high bridge of his nose, now crooked. She’d left him with an ear for music and a love of nature his father never seemed to share.

She’d left him with his father. 

He shook the last drop out of one flask and started on the other. No, there was nothing left to go home to, no one to seek out and nothing to do except to go back to bouncing at bars, getting free drinks and keeping the peace of the seriously intoxicated. Maybe that, he thought, was not such a bad fate. All the booze it would take to numb him and the occasional ability to let out the violence that made his skin itch. Maybe a hero was not someone who won a battle, but someone who kept one drunk from knifing the other.

No, David thought, not even that. I don’t get to be any kind of hero. There wasn’t much point in anything else, not for him. His body belonged to the Army no more, and the only thing he could think to do with it was make it go the fuck away. All his urges, all his desires, everything he was: away, one drink at a time.

>>>>>>

They sent him to the hospital at Cheltenham, England, in preparation for sending him back to the states. In the long, low half-cylinders, men were crowded on every available bed, cot, or surface, sometimes close enough to bump each other as they stirred in the night. Supplies chronically ran low, and David was kept awake at night by men moaning, heartfelt and quietly, because the pain medication they’d been given had run out and there was nothing to give them until morning. He laid on the cots they’d been forced to resort to, after the beds had been exhausted, and watched the sodium lights outside crawl across the ceiling, to the sound of moans, quiet weeping, coughs and the occasional, sinister silence.

By the time they’d found a doctor to talk to him, he’d given up doing anything but laying there, staring at the ceiling, listening to the particular music of wounded men. The busy nurses hadn’t had time to get to him for the last week, and in that time he’d decided to give up living, to let himself lay there and die—anything but sleep and dream of bodies, rubble, and never-ending mud.

The doctor they found him was exhausted. His voice, issuing somewhere over David’s head, sounded dull and faint. “How are we feeling today?”

David kept staring at the ceiling, watching the paint that had already started to crack.

“Are we feeling sad or anxious?”

David snorted, breaking his study of the paint, and rolled his eyes over to see a thin, shaky man trailing a single, overworked nurse. The man gave him a short, terse smile.

“Are you currently experiencing any pain?”

David looked at him for a moment before responding. “I’m fine, doc. Go bother someone else.”

The doctor looked at the purplish bags under David’s eyes and the tremor in his hands. “Are you sleeping?”

“Sure. Great.” David shifted on the cot, changing the pressure on his back and hips from the wooden poles on the edges of the thing. The woolen blanket dangled on the dirty floor, its tips absorbing the filth on the floor.

“Any bad dreams?”

“No, doc, I only dream about sunshine, puppies, and big naked tits.”

The doctor startled, then frowned. “You don’t have to be vulgar.”

“Vulgar? You know what I’m going to do when they ship me back to the States? I’m going to go to a bar, find the biggest set of tits in the joint, put my head between them and howl like a dog.” David smiled nastily at the doctor, watching him purse his lips. “And then I’m going to drag them out in an alley and make her howl, too.”

From the next bed, a man with a Cockney accent laughed rustily. “Go bovver efry jezzy you can find.”

The doctor threw his hands up. “Nurse, mark this one ready for transport. Try not to drink yourself to death, young man. And use a little protection.”

The sound of David’s laughter followed the doctor out. The man in the bed next to him looked over. “I’ll be bovvering tha jezzys meself.” He jiggled his remaining leg under the blanket. “Soon as I figger how to get tha job done wifout me leg.”

David winced, looking at the still-covered stump. “Gun?”

“Nah, Kraut mine. Clean off, wiv a bit of metal all round.” The man looked David up and down. “Lucky bastard.”

David flinched, and rolled back over to stare at the ceiling again.

“Come on, Yank,” said the man, “just a bit of fun.”

David stayed staring at the same point on the ceiling, willing himself away from the cot and the men around him who had somehow managed what he could not, and had some sign of their injury, something to offer those who would look and judge as proof that he had given something, anything, to the war. After a tense moment, the man rolled back down and went back to his own contemplation of the ceiling. The ward began to settle for the night, the quiet, low sobbing of men at the far extreme of pain and the occasional hoarse screams of men caught in their nightmares. David had almost succumbed to sleep when it occurred to him what he'd be facing when they took him back to the States.

His wounds, if they had been caused by the war, were invisible—David had nothing to show anyone but the fact that he was at home while the rest of the men were at war. He had nothing to show anyone but his able body and his shame at being unfit to serve. He wasn't a hero, or even just another soldier, or a civilian who just wasn't fit enough to be sent to war.

He was a reject.

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE: This one is going to take me longer because of the material. The fic itself is going to be dark like Satan's heart and deal really candidly with abuse of various descriptions. 
> 
> If you're easily bothered by child abuse, this is a bad fic for you to read. Please go find fluffier material.


End file.
